by Rebecca Berlin
If you need to reduce your workforce for economic reasons, you should develop a fair plan for determining which workers will be let go and which will stay. Otherwise your business may be sued for employment discrimination by one or more of the worker's you let go.
One of the first questions to ask is whether you need to reduce your workforce across the board or if the necessary reductions will be limited to certain departments or positions. Once you have a good idea of what positions and what departments need to be cut, it is time to decide on a plan for determining who will be let go. You want the process to be perceived as fair and you want to be able to support your reasons for doing it this way.
The process that intuitively makes the most sense is to keep the best employees and terminate the worst. This is where that perception of being fair will come into play. Your worst employee may not in fact perceive that he is your worst employee. He might think he is being fired because of his nationality. Or maybe your worst employee just returned to work after a lengthy medical leave.
If you want to keep the best and let go of the worst, you are going to need objective criteria for determining what employees fall into which group. If you have conducted regular performance evaluations and documented employee disciplinary problems, these can be used to separate the good from the bad. Rely on other objective criteria as well. Have any employees received special recognition or obtained advanced training? Do you have data that shows that some employees are more productive than others? If you are going to go this route, you'll need to analyze the facts.
Another method of choosing who stays and who goes is one based on seniority. Okay, so this method isn't really fair. It means that the 45 year old that you hired 6 months ago, the one who finally got his college degree after all these years, the guy who has been working late and on weekends, the one who is doing a great job – he's out. You're going to keep Mr. "That's not in my job description" since you hired him 2 years ago. Chances are, both those who stay and those who go will feel they have been treated fairly. Besides, all that potential unfairness is made up for by the fact that a plan based on seniority doesn't illegally discriminate against any protected group. Theoretically, people who belong to protected groups have the same likelihood of being let go as people from non-protected groups. However, if for some reason most of your more recent hires belong to protected groups and most of your long timers don't, you just might want to consider a different plan.
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